Yeah we’re both alive, still. What exactly do you do in the games industry, btw? And which company? SPEAK.

Sorry for the slow reply, Tarinoc – hope you still get to see it! Maybe when you return in 4 years. :P

That’s neat. Though I’m starting to have my doubts that Norwegian Wood will ever be playable, it’s cool to see that you’re designing games in another environment.

I too have joined the games industry recently, working, in fact, with one of the people that runs a design blog you link to. Interesting. Small world. I’ll drop my head in again in another 4 years, I imagine.

Maybe Norwegian Wood will be up and running then… :P

So it depends on how you structure it. Teleportation shrinks the world, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If the rest of the world is structured around that, you don’t necessarily lose anything, and you gain usability in the process. UO would be vastly injured by removing teleportation. It would have rendered the early days completely unplayable, and the later days hugely frustrating. The rune marking system *did* encourage people to explore too, as did the housing system.

Yes, in a theme park game, it basically destroys any need for the bits between the rides, but that’s basically down to poor level design. If every zone is a ride, you still need to go through all of them, and the teleportation just lets you skip previously viewed content. I’m not sure that WoW would be much impacted by making flight paths instant, for instance, but still requiring you to flag them, except that gold drops per hour would need to be rebalanced to take the reduced travel time into account.

There’s a line between experience and usability that needs to be carefully maintained. And teleportation, done properly, is easily on the right side of it.

That being said, I have to disagree with the teleportation point. Fast travel does cause one issue – the world gets smaller – but it doesn’t inherently move the game toward or away worldy. Other things are responsible for that. Instant gratification isn’t the enemy, incentive structure and core mechanics are; the issue is more in the heavy focus on content as gameplay rather than interaction as gameplay.

I have indeed thought about making a virtual world, for about 11 years now I think? I’ve got some notes lying around here and there =P
I’ve been sort of busy helping out on this other game for nearly two years now, though.

Remember that time the thing happened with the stuff? Ah, it’s good to catch up with you. Brings back a lot of memories.

I apologize for not reading your boring stupid blog enough to know if this subject has been covered before, but have you thought about making a virtual world?

Let’s not worry about the minor technical issue of getting it onto a computer- I’m asking do you have the discipline to sit down with a pen and paper and create a rough outline for what this world would look like?